1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to systems for providing telephone services and in particular to a method for handling incoming calls to an individual user's premises.
2. Description of Related Art
Telephone service has changed dramatically over the last few years. The change was driven by the progress of analog and digital electronic systems, the steep decline in the price of electronic equipment, and the desire to provide more services to customers faced with a massive increase in the digital information available to them. Thus, the telephone network established by long distance carriers, such as American Telephone and Telegraph, Sprint, and MCI, and the Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs), provides more services than the mere exchange of voice information between a caller and a called party.
The original model for a telephone network of establishing a voice conversation between a physically static caller using a fixed instrument, for example, a telephone situated on a desk, and another person, similarly sitting at another desk next to a telephone, is now obsolete. The exclusive association of a telephone call, i.e., a call processed and routed through the telephone network, with voice only data, is gone. Gone also is the association of a single person with a single telephone number.
More recently changes in telephone service have accelerated with a literal explosion in the number of telephone instruments that one person can use to transfer information through the telephone network. Table 1 is a list of some of the common telephone instruments that use the telephone network.
TABLE 1 ______________________________________ Common Telephone Instruments ______________________________________ Plain Old Telephone (POT) Facsimile Machine Cellular Telephone Desktop and Portable Computer Modem Telephone Answering Device Caller ID Telephone Pager Personal Digital Assistant ______________________________________
The types of telephone instruments listed in Table 1 are referred to herein collectively as "telephone instruments". In general, a telephone instrument is any device that is accessed through the telephone network and has a telephone number associated with the instrument through which a "telephone call" can be established to transfer information to the instrument.
It is very easy to initiate a "telephone call" with any one of these telephone instruments. However, the trend toward a distributed workplace has made receiving telephone calls more difficult and time consuming for everyone. Typically, a mobile worker, or a worker who is based out of a home office or a small office, has one or more telephone instruments that ring in the office. However, when the worker is away from the office, e.g., traveling or at a client's site, the worker still needs the ability to receive a wide variety of telephone calls.
The current model of making a telephone call is based on a physical mapping with the caller knowing the telephone number of a telephone instrument (telephone, facsimile machine, modem, etc. . . . ) at the site of the party being called. This model requires that a caller knows the telephone number for each different type of telephone instrument at each different site where the called party may be located. For a worker that is at multiple sites, this requires that each party, who may want to contact the worker, knows a plethora of telephone numbers. For a party that must reach multiple workers at multiple different sites, the number of required telephone numbers grows even larger.
In view of the complexities of establishing communications, and the desire to support more exchange of information, many different services that each utilize a single different telephone number are being offered. Typical services available through a central office of a telephone company, a service provider, or available with some of the more sophisticated telephone instruments are listed in Table 2. Herein, a central office is the point electrically from which telephone services are provided. A service provider is a company that offers cellular telephone service, or paging service, for example.
TABLE 2 ______________________________________ Telephone Services ______________________________________ Caller ID Call Waiting Three-way Calling Distinctive Ring Call Forwarding Voice Mail Menu Option Calling Busy Call Forwarding EMail Voice Mail Boxes No Answer Call 500 and 700 Forwarding Services Conference Calling ______________________________________
Each of the services listed in Table 2 provides a single telephone number that can be called to either communicate with or leave information for a called party. However, these services only further complicate communications. With all these communication services,. people now have many communication addresses, telephone numbers, and instruments that need constant checking. The once-simple idea of communicating has become even more complex.
Typically, each of the available services, such as central office, paging, and cellular, has a different telephone number. For each service, the user must give out a new telephone number for that service since calls can only be routed to a single number. Call forwarding was designed to alleviate this problem and allow a user to route a call to one telephone number to another telephone number of the user's choice.
In the current form, call forwarding can only be activated at the site assigned to the original telephone number, although certain companies are working to remove this limitation. The limitations of call forwarding include:
i) no selectivity as to which calls are forwarded; PA1 ii) an inability to allow parallel ringing of an instrument at the location for the original telephone number and an instrument at the location for the forwarded telephone number; and PA1 iii) the difficulty of retaining messaging services on forwarded calls.
Forwarding calls on a user's telephone line to a cellular telephone introduces new problems since the cellular telephone may not be turned on. If the user has both cellular and central office voice mail, this increases the number of locations that must be routinely checked for messages. In addition, it is particularly difficult for the central office to detect when a cellular telephone is turned off and route the call to the central office voice mail system, because a cellular telephone that is turned off provides the same indication as an answered cellular call, i.e., ringing followed by a voice.
The ability to monitor calls, e.g. listening without the caller's knowledge as a call goes to voice mail, and choose which calls to answer or let go to voice mail, is another feature expected by workers in the home office. This ability is very valuable to the home office workers who may find themselves not always in a position to answer an incoming business call.
The ability to monitor incoming calls is lost when using call forwarding or central office voice mail, i.e., when the call is transferred to remote location. In addition, to monitor a call in the home office, the worker must be within hearing distance of the telephone answering device (TAD).
While it is important to route the many types of calls to the worker, it is also as important to allow the worker the ability to monitor calls that are routed to any location that is either not on the user's premises, or not within hearing distance of the user.
To the best of the inventors' knowledge, the ability to remotely monitor calls is currently not available with any existing phone system or feature.
In the typical home office, callers have no options, or limited options. Typically, the incoming call is routed to a specific telephone instrument connected to the telephone line for the called telephone number, e.g., a modem, facsimile machine, or telephone. For voice communications, typically the telephone rings first and, if the call is not answered in a predetermined number of rings, the caller is sent to voice mail. As used herein, predetermined means that when a call is incoming the number of rings required before an action or operations occurs has been previously defined and so for a particular call is fixed. For this telephone set up, callers are never given the option to just leave a message without first trying to place a telephone call to the desired party.
Similarly, when calling a home office, a caller is not given an option to page the called party. This is a choice that must currently be made before making a phone call. The ability to call a single telephone number and make a decision after calling to page, talk, or send a voice mail message to the called party is not an option that is available to callers.
Currently, the small office worker has the option to only direct calls (e.g. ring a phone) to a single physical telephone instrument at a single location. When workers have locations at home, in a remote office, and in their car, this is very limiting. To increase the flexibility of routing telephone calls directed to the user's telephone number, central offices have developed a variety of new services. Central office services, such as Accessline, allow a user to establish a set of numbers to which calls can be routed. This type of service suffers, however, in that each incoming call can be routed only to a single destination at one time. Thus, this type of service ultimately suffers the same limitations as does call forwarding to a cellular telephone. They are also (reputed) to be difficult to change.
Several RBOCs have offered 700 and 500 area-code telephone numbers that are designed to track a user for life. The key problem is that yet another new telephone number must be given out, and a user's callers must become aware of the new service.
In addition to routing calls from a premises, the user is also faced with routing calls on the premises. Most small business owners do not like to incur the extra expense associated with a Private Branch Exchange (PBX) to handle multiple telephone lines. Thus, a market has developed for fax line managers and similar routers (e.g., distinctive ring routers) that only direct calls to telephone instruments on the customer's premises. In general, this type of router does not allow a call to be re-routed once a connection is established to a particular telephone instrument.
Unfortunately, none of the above services or devices satisfies all of a typical user's requirements. The requirements vary depending on what the user is doing and on what telephone instruments and services the user has chosen. A user may choose to take calls in a car, with unanswered calls going to voice mail or an answering machine. The user also may like to choose to have calls ring at a home office and at a client's office. The user may use a client's voice mail while the user is on-site, and use his or her own when at home. The list of potential requirements is endless. Unfortunately, as described above, a system is not currently available that can provide such services unless the user is willing to install an expensive PBX or similar system and even then the problems with monitoring, routing, and taking calls off site are not solved.
The situation is exacerbated by the excessive complexity in connecting a caller to a party in view of the different types of calls transmitted through the telephone network, the large number of telephone instruments that a typical user accesses, and the large number of telephone numbers that a user must provide to be called at many different locations. To reduce the complexity, the number of telephone numbers known to the caller must be reduced; calls must be dynamically routed depending on the type of call and the circumstances of the connection process; and some new services, such as monitoring a call at any location, must be added to aid in the programmable routing of the calls. Unfortunately, to the best knowledge of the inventors, none of these functions is available today at the personal level from the existing telephone service providers.